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But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure the

But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.

kerkeslager 7y ago
I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    > He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point. > But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
- calibas 7y ago
  Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience. The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- grawprog 7y ago
  >quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
  - milesvp 7y ago
    You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with. That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
    - ksaj 7y ago
      Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews. For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market. Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?
  - clairity 7y ago
titzer 7y ago
After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings. The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that. It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams. Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.
bluGill 7y ago
Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
- thebean11 7y ago
  Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.
  - maigret 7y ago
    The ads I see on my paper newspaper are often better “targeted” than the ones I see (or block ;) ) on their website. Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
  - eitland 7y ago
    I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising. Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier. Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever. But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms? I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.
modriano 7y ago
Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted. I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll. I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).

kerkeslager 7y ago

I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point. > But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
calibas 7y ago
Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience. The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
grawprog 7y ago
>quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
- milesvp 7y ago
  You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with. That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
  - ksaj 7y ago
    Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews. For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market. Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?
- clairity 7y ago

titzer 7y ago

After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.

scarejunba 7y ago
You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings. The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that. It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams. Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.

bluGill 7y ago

Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.

thebean11 7y ago
Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.
- maigret 7y ago
  The ads I see on my paper newspaper are often better “targeted” than the ones I see (or block ;) ) on their website. Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
- eitland 7y ago
  I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising. Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier. Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever. But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms? I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.

modriano 7y ago

Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted. I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll. I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).